A Deep Hierarchical Fusion Network for Fullband Acoustic Echo Cancellation

Deep learning based wideband (16kHz) acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) approaches have surpassed traditional methods. This work proposes a deep hierarchical fusion (DHF) network with intra-network and inter-network fusion to further improve the wideband AEC performance. Meanwhile, this work extends the existing wideband systems to enable fullband (48kHz) AEC while simultaneously ensuring automatic speech recognition compatibility by incorporating with an ASR loss. The proposed system has ranked 2nd place in ICASSP 2022’s AEC Challenge.